Monthly archive: October, 2012

Within the Marxism Reading Group in the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at the University of Nottingham we have just finished David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution [2012]. I started reading this book with great excitement. My expectation was that it might deliver the sort of intervention similar to The New Imperialism [2003]. That book was hugely successful in drawing new readers to the vast corpus of Harvey’s outstanding scholarship and opened up new political and intellectual agendas, not least linked to the political economy of accumulation by dispossession and its inner connection to the appropriation of spaces of exploitation. In Rebel Cities urban transformation is central to the endeavour to recover and understand alternative forms of spatial reorganisation in cityscapes from around the world. The book is a key contribution to rethinking urban social movements and anti-capitalist resistance today, albeit with some rough edges.

In my book Unravelling Gramsci (2007) I argued against a mechanical application of the thought and practice of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. Instead, an interpretative method was developed that drew from Gramsci’s recommendation to grasp the leitmotiv or rhythm of thought of a thinker in relation to practical concerns relevant to the present. After all, as Karl Marx relayed in the Theses on Feuerbach, the question of the relevance of theory has to be grounded in the ‘this-sidedness’ of thinking in practice. Hence, for Gramsci, historical materialism should not be conceived as a total or rigid doctrine beyond question but as a philosophy of praxis. Indeed, in a newspaper article for Il Grido del Popolo entitled ‘Our Marx’, dated as early as 1918, Gramsci rejected any perception of Marx as a ‘shepherd wielding a crook’, or ‘some Messiah who left us a string of parables laden with categorical imperatives and absolute, unchallengeable norms, lying outside the categories of time and space’. Just as Gramsci received Marx in this manner then this is how we should receive Gramsci. How can this approach to the history of ideas in general and the significance of historicising Gramsci in particular be further developed?

Spiralling violence in the horrific war on drugs in Mexico has resulted in up to 60,000 deaths since outgoing President Felipe Calderón launched a military offensive against the drug cartels in 2006. Coincident with this violence has also been the spiralling levels of money laundering pulling together institutions of transnational capital, Mexico’s drugs cartels, and their past and present conviviality with the formidable political structures of Mexico’s dominant ruling parties. These spirals of global networks connecting drug cartels, political party structures, transnational banking operations, and military security apparatuses remind one of similar formations in the past linked to the United States’ so-called War on Drugs. Earlier spirals of violence and laundering linked to drug trafficking were common place in the years of the Iran-Contra Affair, the United States’ invasion of Panama, or the scandals surrounding the Bank of Commerce and Credit International. These earlier spirals of global networks were wonderfully captured in the artwork of Mark Lombardi (1951-2000). But how might we begin to piece together, with a similar spatial awareness, some of the spiralling elements connecting the drugs war in Mexico today?

How can the life and work of two great intellectual figures, the recently deceased Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) – one of Mexico’s most famous writers – and the recently deceased Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) – one of the world’s most famous Marxists – be correlated? In his autobiography Interesting Times (2002), Eric Hobsbawm described Carlos Fuentes as one of his ‘dear friends’, among many others, in Latin America, a region in which the historian always commanded a strong following and interest. Hobsbawm’s autobiography also carries a significant chapter that addresses the distance between Latin American intellectuals as members of an elite social class and those constituting the majority of everyday life in civil society. But how can one assess the social function of intellectuals such as Carlos Fuentes caught between the relations of state and civil society? My research and interviews with Carlos Fuentes, as well as personal correspondence with Eric Hobsbawm himself on this topic, reveal something significant about how to situate the role of the intellectual within the shadow of the state in Latin America.

At the Standing Group on International Relations (SGIR) 7th Pan-European International Relations Conference in Stockholm (7-9 September 2010) I presented a paper entitled ‘Producing Uneven Development: State Formation, Capital Accumulation and Industrialisation in Latin America’. The paper flipped out of the completion of my new book, Revolution and State in Modern Mexico that provides an account of state power that is both spatially sensitive and attuned to its territorial organisation across different scales in Mexico, while also giving consideration to different counter-spaces and concrete movements of contestation. In this post, I relay one key focus that appears in the book and the conference paper, which is the consolidation of capitalism under Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) in Mexico between 1940 and 1954 and the specific period known as stabilised development, from 1955 through to 1972. How is this linked to present concerns about capitalism in developing countries and especially those authors that claim the rise of transnational state processes today? I will address this question through a critical engagement with William Robinson’s transnational state thesis in Latin America and Global Capitalism, which claims that we have experienced the emergence of a transnational state as part of global restructuring processes.